


A Happy Ending

by HK44



Series: Percy At The Nome [2]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types
Genre: Drabble, Fluff, Happy Ending, M/M, good things, there's other characters but they're barely mentioned and im too tired to keep tagging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 06:01:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23966554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HK44/pseuds/HK44
Summary: People make jokes that Percy would never handle domesticity. That he attracts danger like Hazel attracts cursed metals. He laughs along because they’re not wrong.
Relationships: Nico di Angelo/Percy Jackson
Series: Percy At The Nome [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1759660
Comments: 12
Kudos: 169





	A Happy Ending

**Author's Note:**

> uh, technically not a fic, not really in the traditionally written sense, but i'm proud of it so idc

People make jokes that Percy would never handle domesticity. That he attracts danger like Hazel attracts cursed metals. He laughs along because they’re not wrong.

But it’s not him who can’t handle domesticity. Why would it be? People say he’s his father’s son but he’s his mother’s too. Loyal, loving, willing to die and a little bit obsessed with falling in love with damaged children. He takes to his friends the same way his mother does - with instincts to hold and coddle and protect.

Annabeth struggles. She grew up fighting, learning. It’ll be more of a process for her to adjust. She can supplement her days with hours and hours spent studying but even that will grow repetitive and stressful.

Percy is used to being thrown wildly from place to place. He can’t wait to relax.

They change their plans.

They stay in New York. She goes to school, keeps fighting like a predator and he shifts into the Nome. The first demigod to be accepted into a magician’s safe place without question.

They break up. It’s easier. They fell in love during a war. They stayed in love during a war. Without demands of a prophecy tying them together, it’s more work to breathe. She snaps at him. He refuses to engage.

They fight. They split. They breathe. They love each other. They’ll never stop. She dates Reyna. He’s never been happier for her.

Carter is sweet and Percy loves him too. But Carter is in a relationship and so painfully straight it makes Percy laugh when he tries to relate to Sadie’s bi crises.

Sadie likes him to the point of sibling torture. He’s the only kid in his group of friends who doesn’t have one, half or full, and he likes how she bullies him around, always playfully and demanding. The same way she treats Carter and Zia and all the little ones.

They flock to him. Water based magicians’s like learning from him. Felix holds his hands whenever they go to the zoo and tells him so many facts about the penguins Percy could write a book, if it weren’t for his dyslexia.

Bast doesn’t always trust him. But she doesn’t kill him, doesn’t attack and it’s nice. Finally a god that doesn’t want to blow him up just because he’s him.

He didn’t realize how comforting it would feel to not have to worry.

Walt likes him. And Anubis. It’s probably because of Nico, who visits often, carrying gifts from his father for Osiris and his own Underworld brood and training tips for Walt, who’s still adjusting and Anubis, who’s never had a human host before.

Percy should be surprised. He isn’t. Of course Nico knew.

He knows so much and tells so little.

Nobody ever asks him questions about what he did when he was hiding from Camp. Nobody ever asks him questions about his life in the Underworld. Nobody ever asks him anything about himself.

Percy starts.

Nico is wary. There’s a part of him that will never trust anyone that isn’t his sister, but gods above if Percy doesn’t want him to. Not because of childhood love or because he’s the Hero but because he’s a friend and he wants Nico to know how much he cares, how much he can care when he’s not busy trying to survive and being selfish.

They talk about it after six months. It’s funny to Percy. Six months. Half a year.

Amazing how that works.

He leaves the Nome and travels with Nico. He always comes back to them, his new family. He visits his old. The moment Rachel looks at him at a certain way, he knows to flee. A demigod who’s survived being the subject of two wars, who’s lead battles and armies and has power that near levels actual gods. They’d drag him down with them.

His father has more children. He saves them when he can. He teaches them. In person, over Sadie’s phone or through Iris messages, he teaches them. He’d never let them struggle as he did.

He doesn’t tell them about the Nome, the safety they gave him. He earned that, he was offered that. It’s not for anyone else, not even Nico who flocked in and out like he always has. But he tells them how to be safe and swears to help if they’re ever roped into painful situations like he was. They rarely are.

He always helps. No matter how it hurts to find himself back in a world he never wanted.

They keep traveling in the moments he can breathe. Nico never says anything about where he goes and Percy just follows. He’s grateful not to have to think, to plan ahead, to worry, to be in charge.

He meets other gods. Norse, Sumerian, Hindu. He falls a little in love with Kali and her volatility. She gives him a necklace of skulls. He almost cries. Nico laughs and dances with her.

He falls a little in love with him too.

Reyna and Annabeth keep dating. Still kissing Jason, Piper joins them. Reyna and Annabeth get married in the most meticulously planned wedding of the century. Leo officiates. The sheer smell of dozens of demigods steers away any monsters.

Percy cries. He hugs them and wishes he never had to stop.

He’s thirty. He’s surprised he lasted this long but Nico rolls his eyes and tells him he’s never been farther from death. They stop traveling and set up shop in New York. And California. Their apartment has two entrances but one home. He doesn’t ask Nico how he got it. It’s obvious.

Hades is the only one to really hold his children close.

He has to be talked down from turning it into half an aquarium. Annabeth helps him dedicate one wall to a giant tank of Betta fish. Persephone shows up with a dozen flowers while Nico is sleeping and hangs them everywhere. She gives Percy a strict schedule of watering but the plants never seem to die either way. She kisses Nico on the head as she leaves.

Percy’s surprised.

He knows he shouldn’t be.

He’s forty when Nico finally kisses him. When he tells the story, part of him wishes it’d been a special day, a special occasion, just to make it as magical as it felt but it’s just an average Sunday in the middle of August when it’s far too hot to be kissing anyone.

It’s quick, chaste and chapped lips but he can’t help but want more. Nico gives him a sugar cookie instead. He eats it.

They kiss again a month later when Nico comes home, bleeding and covered in monster dust and grumbling like the old man his soul and bones tell him he is. Percy has never been more attracted to someone in his life.

They don’t get married, they don’t have kids. They adopt some kittens. They’d intended to adopt puppies since both of them already had dogs but the look of his sisters planting kitten after kitten into Nico’s scarred arms and atop his head is too adorable. They get three. It’s chaos and it’s perfect.

Hazel and Frank celebrate their anniversary in New Rome. Percy takes them to dinner. They talk about their daughter, a ferocious young woman who raises the dead and commands armies like it’s her birthright. They talk about their son, timid and kind and a jeweler now. Frank shows off the bracelet he made for him.

Hazel’s eyes look calm for once, not fearful like they used to.

He visits Annabeth after and falls asleep on her couch to a documentary on modern architecture. She’s finally relaxed into her age, into the life they once had planned. He’s not jealous.

He’s happy. He loves how she accepts her coffee from Reyna’s fingers and how she pets his hair and doesn’t talk about monsters with an almost fond sense of longing.

He wakes up to Nico’s voice and follows him home just as the sun rises over the sky. He wonders which one he’s watching and murmurs names into Nico’s skin as they fall back to sleep.

He wakes up at noon and calls Carter for a late lunch. He tells his mother he loves her for the millionth time. Riptide is in his pocket as it’ll always be. He fights monsters on his way to work and comes home to Nico sprawled out on the floor and watching old cartoons with vivid interest.

They travel some days, but he’s happy to have a home. He visits the Nome still. It’s the only place he doesn’t have to recount stories that live on as heroic legends to others and painful nightmares to him. He still rescues his siblings when he can and teaches them when they ask.

It’s been so long though they begin to teach each other.

He doesn’t go on any quests. People have long since stopped asking. He wakes up, he goes to work, he comes home.

It’s utterly repetitive and boring. It’s so routine. It’s far too domestic.

He loves it.

He’s never been happier.

**Author's Note:**

> might rewrite this as an actual lengthy fic, might not. if i do, i'll add it as another chapter and move this one to the second chapter instead so you see the actual good stuff first. probably won't write something or will try but never finish. i have like seven thousand other things to do and i'm tired, but, hey, we can dream right?


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